[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 10:10:37AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> I don't know that I ever thought of the earlier Red Hat releases as
> seriously attempting to be desktop-ready.  As I recall, the first real
> effort to make a desktop friendly Linux was Caldera Desktop Linux, which
> was based off Red Hat (2.something, IIRC), but at the time, RH was still
> shipping stuff like FVWM as it's default window manager, maybe it was
> that horrible mangling that wound up getting bundled as 'fvwm95', which
> had a Windows-style 'Start' button.  Back then, I was still jumping back
> and forth between FVWM 1.x and tvtwm.

What window manager was there in 1995? KDE and GNOME did not exist, 
CDE was a commercial product. According to the Wikipedia, FVWM existed
before then, but I don't remember it being in Slackware. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fvwm

FVWM-95 was FVWM hacked to look like Windows 95, but althought the wikipedia
says it was produced in 1995, I don't remember seeing it until several years
later.

It wasn't that Red Hat was not intended to be a desktop friendly Linux, as it
were, it's just that Linux was not very desktop friendly at that point.

> True enough.  Just like I would imagine very few people refer to their
> G1 phones as running Linux, they refer to it as running Android.  The
> kernel, by that point, is rather irrelevant.

I don't know how long that will be. Unless Google brands their OS as Android,
the Android phones will probably be re-branded as ChromeOS, or whatever
they actually call it.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM